Get ready to cry and laugh with Dillie Keane of Fascinating Aida fame
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Dillie Keane: An unconventional journey
Most people know Dillie Keane as one of the original members of the highly successful musical trio Fascinating Aida – a British comedy singing group and satirical cabaret act. For 30 years, she and various female singing partners wrote and performed their satirical shows. Keane would also enjoy an acclaimed solo career. Taken together, they wrote music that was clever, responsive to the times, and unabashedly subversive.
Writing in The Independent, a journalist notes that ‘when there was a backlash against free love, they sang The Herpes Tango. As jogging took over the world, they wrote a song about giving it up. And when the last pope died and the Vatican was busy choosing a new one, Fascinating Aida dreamt up a ditty about the search for a possible pope. As if the pressure to come up with constantly relevant songs wasn’t hard enough, this group did it in rhyme and in harmony. They’ve been described as “Absolutely Fabulous meets Noel Coward, as sung by the Andrew Sisters.”
Unsurprisingly, they were a hit. The group received a Perrier Award nomination at the 1984 Edinburgh Festival, and went on to be nominated three times for the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment (1995, 2000 and 2004), and twice for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revue (2005 and 2010). Keane and Adele Anderson were also nominated for the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.
Keane began her career by studying music at Trinity College, Dublin and acting at LAMDA, much to her mother’s horror. (The latter believed that all actresses were prostitutes.) During this time, to make ends meet, she worked in a bar, sold junk on a stall on the Portobello Road and posed as a life model.“I remember running and bicycling everywhere,” she told journalists.“It was the most exciting time of my life, living your most fullest and astonishing life and acting school was everything I wanted it to be. It couldn’t have been better.”
She went on to enjoy a successful acting career, founding Fascinating Aida in 1983 and discovering her now long-term writing partner Anderson, who joined in 1984. Since then, Fascinating Aïda has become established as one of the most successful cabaret groupings of all time. The trio has amassed more than 17 million YouTube views. Keane’s ode to “dogging,” featuring perfect comedic timing and carefully chosen lyrics, has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube.
Famously, Fascinating Aida would tour in a van, with Dillie at the wheel. The ‘van virus’struck her early in her career, and she’s been through the gamut of Transits since. “I had several of the rounder-looking ones from the early 1980s and had a huge, high-top, six-wheeled one I called ‘Godzilla’.
While on tour, she told a journalist from The Telegraph that she loves swinging the Transit up and down the country from Newcastle to Norwich — “We’ll take pretty B-roads if we haven’t seen them before” — and dropping into provincial shops or stopping off for a round of golf. But it’s all beginning to pall a little.”
Keane chose to reinvent herself as a solo act, saying of her new show: “I’ve been writing songs for now nearly 35 years, and I’ve amassed a collection which are quite personal to me and there [are] very old songs and very new songs, and so they span a lifetime. There are stories about how the songs came about and how the songs get written. … It’ll make you cry, I think, because people keep saying, ‘Oh my God, you made me cry,’ and it’s also terribly funny about getting older, and life and finding the right person. So it’s sort of semi-autobiographical without being too indulgent.”